As Her Old School Faces the End, a Justice Reminisces

Blessed Sacrament School, among the 24 schools the New York Archdiocese plans to shut.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

By DAVID GONZALEZ

January 25, 2013

The planned closing of Blessed Sacrament School in the Bronx — a haven amid the housing projects in the Soundview neighborhood — has left many parents and graduates upset. That includes the valedictorian of the class of 1968, who grew up in the projects that now bear her name: Sonia Sotomayor, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.

“I am heartbroken,” Justice Sotomayor said Friday in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where she is on tour for “My Beloved World,” her memoir. “You know how important those eight years were? It’s symbolic of what it means for all our families, like my mother, who were dirt-poor. She watched what happened to my cousins in public school and worried if we went there, we might not get out. So she scrimped and saved. It was a road of opportunity for kids with no other alternative.”

Indeed, a glance at some of New York City’s most successful and influential Latino and black professionals and politicians is like a Catholic School All-Star alumni roster. It would include Fernando Ferrer, a former Bronx borough president and acting chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; Nelson Roman, recently nominated to be a federal judge; Julissa Reynoso, United States ambassador to Uruguay; Jennifer Lopez; and her former beau, Sean Combs.

The Roman Catholic schools that have been shuttered in impoverished neighborhoods in recent years have produced enough lawyers to staff a white-shoe firm and enough doctors for a top-tier research hospital.

And those schools could make the difference between becoming a judge or appearing before one.

“The incidence of high school dropouts for kids from Catholic grammar schools is dramatically lower,” Justice Sotomayor said in the interview. “The number of kids who go on to higher education is statistically higher. There are wonderful public schools in the city, but our kids don’t often live near them or they haven’t been adequately prepared for entrance to those schools.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Mike Theiler / Reuters

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced this week that it would close 24 schools, including 7 elementary schools in the Bronx.

Justice Sotomayor’s memoir, which warmly describes her life before she became a federal judge, has scenes that are instantly recognizable by any Puerto Rican striver who ever lived on Kelly Street or Southern Boulevard in the South Bronx.

Her recollection of Blessed Sacrament is unsentimental and unvarnished, reflecting the complicated feeling shared by many of that era’s graduates.

She remembers how third grade left her in constant dread of running afoul of the black-robed Sisters of Charity who taught classes bursting with up to 50 students.

“Discipline,” she wrote, “was virtually an eighth sacrament.”

On Friday, Justice Sotomayor recalled one episode from her years at the school. When she told a nun she did not want to eat a piece of rye bread, the nun invoked a familiar response. “There are starving kids in India,” the nun said.

A uniform before judicial robes.

Miss Sotomayor’s reply?

“Well, I’ll mail it to them.”

She was hauled up to the front of the cafeteria and slapped. “Everyone saw me get punished for the smart mouth that I had,” she said. “That was a message that doesn’t always get taught when you’re struggling to survive, that there are other people more needy than you and you have an obligation to think about them.”

Her father died when she was in fourth grade, and her mother had to raise Sonia and her brother Juan Luis alone. Blessed Sacrament gave her mother, Celina, a two-for-one deal. Her mother worked hard, even as it drew the disapproval of the nuns who frowned on women working outside the home. But, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “The irony of course was that my mother wouldn’t have been working such long hours if not to pay for the education she believed was the key to aspirations for a better life.”

Miss Sotomayor shared those aspirations by the time she graduated from Blessed Sacrament, even if her eighth-grade teacher Sister Mary Regina was somewhat puzzled.

“The girl’s ambitions, odd as they seem, are to become an attorney and someday marry,” Sister Regina wrote in Sonia’s yearbook. “Hopefully, she wishes to be successful in both fields.

“We predict a new life of challenges in Cardinal Spellman, where she will be attending high school; we hope she will be able to meet these new challenges.”

Sister, consider your hope — and those of countless factory workers, janitors and single mothers and their children — met. And raised.